Applications and Comparison of Different Mathematical Methods to Compute Form Factors for “Radiosity Images”

A fundamental problem in synthetic images is to determine a correct light interaction between surfaces in an environment.The radiosity method is an algorithm based on theories used in thermal engineering that includes effects of reflection between ideal diffuse surfaces. The computation of geometric factors (Form Factors), which describes the energy exchange between surfaces, represents the most expensive part of computational time necessary to generate a synthetic image.This paper aims to analyze different approaches to compute form factors. Subsequently, we make a numerical comparison of the results and provide the evaluation of the relative errors and of the computational time.At the end we present some simple images generated with the different approaches discussed in this paper.